The event focuses on collaboration and designing services related to a shared theme, which was simply presented as “Grow ^”, or as interpreted by the participants, “Grow Up”. The Kansas City Service Jam divided into two smaller groups to design prototypes of two entirely new services.

One KC team tackled the problem of financial acumen among children. They decided to focus on parents who are fiscally responsible and have the desire to facilitate a conversation about finances with their 6-10 year old children.

“We see a lot of solutions that ‘gamify’ or abstract the use of money, our mission was to get these children involved in real world finances.” said David Rondeau, one of the group’s team members.

The group created a prototype application that allows children to utilize their parent’s device in the grocery store aisles for comparison shopping. The app, called “Eenie-Meenie”, centers around the use of cartoon monsters to guide the children by using a barcode scanner to gather information on quantity and price, enabling them to understand the financial aspects of a purchase.

The other KC team prototyped a service related to personal growth, with a particular focus on the problem of procrastination. Team member Rachel Lin said of their project, “Using a co-creative process, we developed the concept of a fun game to help a user break a negative behavior pattern (procrastination) and then guide them through the process of finishing their task.”

Near the final hours of the event, team member Justin Ruggieri said, “It’s pretty amazing that by Sunday we created a viable service which we had no awareness for on Friday.”